Microsoft’s shouty boss Steve Ballmer made a few big noises about Windows 7 sales yesterday, by declaring it was jumping off retail shelves at twice the level of its unloved Vista operating system.
However, he didn’t reveal any sales figures during the firm’s annual shareholder meeting in Bellevue, Washington on Thursday.
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Yeahbut

Is this a sign of W7 being good, or Vista being so hated that all we're seeing is the urge to get rid of it? It'd be interesting to see what the percentages are for what previous OS W7 buyers were running.

Curious

I wish it was possible to find out how many of those Win 7 users go back to XP (like I did on 2 PC's) after they try it and find the much hyped OS isn't that good and not as stable as they claimed.

And before anyone flames me saying the stability is in the programs I ran or my computers hardware config or dodgy drivers the test computer is an Intel atom 330 board (actual intel brand not jetway or the other 3rd party) the Drivers were ALL supplied by MS and built into win 7 I installed nothing. I installed no 3rd party programs on the computer just installed the OS set network settings to let it validate and do any updates. Than let it idle for 8 hours a day for 3 days. On the 3rd (or 4th) day the PC started blue screening on shutdown and rebooting. Win 7 would reboot claiming to fix the error just to BSOD again on shutdown. I installed Ultimate X86 and 64 bit 2 times each and repeated (64 bit did it 1st day) with the same results.

Put XP back on no crashing in 2 weeks runs stable.

Another PC I tried win 7 on would reboot randomly anywhere from 30 mins to around 4 hours. Which again runs stable in XP. I'm waiting for SP1 before I try win 7 again.

But again this is just what I ran into your experience may vary. (side note I did not have any of these issues when I ran the Beta's on the same exact hardware)

It's not all that

@Curious

I've bought a copy of Win7 and was going to upgrade my main XP machine.

As it turned out I just set up a win7 laptop so I had a chance to play before installing. Color me unimpressed. It all feels so sluggish. So I think I'll stick with XP for the next 6 months at least. It'd be nice to 'upgrade' from XP, but it has to actually be an improvement.

As it stands for my money OSX remains the most 'advanced' of the two OSs. Here come the flames.

main driver of W7 adoption over xp

Well I bought 4+Gig ram and have a 64 bit cpu.

Seems a shame not to use them.

Last time I tried W7 I did revert to xp. Maybe I'll give it another go at some time, but I only use it for games. All the serious stuff is Mac (for the other half and tight, pretty integration) or Linux (because I like freedom and functionality).

@ Kevin 6

"(side note I did not have any of these issues when I ran the Beta's on the same exact hardware)"

That would be 1 year-old hardware then. That's why. Of course if you're going to run modern software on antique hardware, you should expect problems. Stupid people trying to install the latest OS on obsolete hardware! Go buy another computer with Windows7 preinstalled, then you can talk.

I Like Win 7

I have windows 7 installed on a small network of 3 desktops and 3 laptops. One of the desktops is a P4 865 chipset with 2.5 gig of ram, the other 2 are P35s and quad core CPU with 4gig ram. only one of the laptops is too old for windows 7 and still has XPH on it, but is only used for email and a bit of wordprocessing with office 97. So far all is working ok, but I did clean installs on each machine, and all the data files are on a NAS drive that all the machines can access. Happy here so far. ( puts on flameproof suit)

@ ElReg!comments!Pierre - Antique Hw

@ Kevin 6 said he ran Windows 7 on same hardware as the Betas and, unlike the betas, it bluescreened

@ ElReg!comments!Pierre responded :-

>>That would be 1 year-old hardware then. .... if you're going to run modern software on antique hardware, you should expect problems. Stupid people trying to install the latest OS on obsolete hardware! Go buy another computer with Windows7 preinstalled, then you can talk.<<

Pierre, tell me you're having a laugh.

First of all no beta was released until about 10 months ago : so why does the hw have to be a year old?

Second, a feature of Windows 7 was that it was meant to have reduced hw requirements; in fact the stated MS requirements are broadly the same as for Vista.

Third, one year old hw is "antique" and "obsolete"?! How do you know Kevins hw was obsolete? As for "antique", the newest bit of my rig is about 4 years old. The swap file is on a dedicated hdd that's about 12 years old, and I have a fdd in it (but never used now) that came from my first PC of about 19 years ago. Sorry, but I didn't know I was supposed to toss a PC in the skip at least once per year - I thought we were meant to be saving the planet.

Hhhmmm...

And, how long did Microsoft keep declaring "Vista" to be a "...run-away success"... before they [Microsoft] finally admitted that it ["Vista"] truly was the market-disaster that EVERYONE knew it to be..?

Oh well... at least "Windows-7/Vista 2.0" (technically, actually closer to "Vista 1.6") is a little better than any of the, officially "Vista"-branded, versions of this dog. It's just too bad that neither Microsoft, nor their products, have actually changed one bit. You know... I'll miss them... NOT.

Antique Hw win

@ Nuke

I installed Windows 7 Pro on a 5 1/2 year old Dell (*). I was expecting the worst as the Windows 7 compatability test said Aero wouldn't work (amongst many other things). Low and behold a smooth upgrade and everything is working fine (including aero).

Genuinely feels loads faster than when running XP (although I may achieved similar benefits by reinstalling XP). No crashes either. Ultimately saved me the cost of buying a new PC (for a while anyway).

So greener than an unripe tomato then.

* Reasonably high spec when I got it and have upgraded memory to 4GB and disk to 500GB over the years